Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker's research enquiry focuses on the process of artistic endeavour, alongside models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining wilfully unresolved. Her mode of working unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker's recent writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

Biography & Statement

Emma
Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham
Trent University. Operating under the title Not
Yet There her enquiry explores models of practice and subjectivity that
resist or refuse the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining
wilfully unresolved. Not Yet There is
shaped by an interdisciplinary, hybridised approach, operating restlessly along
the threshold of writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative
approaches to producing 'texts' parallel to and as art practice; the slippage
between writing on page, to performance in time, between still and moving
image, between individual and collective action.

Cocker’s
ongoing enquiry is often concerned with the endeavour of artistic process, with
a focus on critical-creative ‘ways of operating’ that are self-reflexively
attentive to — whilst also attempting to make tangible — the live circumstances
or ‘occasionality’ of their own processual production: the points where
‘thinking’ is activated or provoked within practice, the unfolding
decision-making, thinking-in-action, the navigation of competing forces, the
activity of working with/through obstacles or of ‘figuring’ something out.
Here, Cocker is concerned with prolonging, emphasising and honouring this space
of indeterminacy, by investigating the potentiality of a form of ‘thinking’
that precedes and might indeed be different to ‘knowledge’, asserting value for
this habitually unseen, undisclosed or often unsharable aspect of an
artist’s/writer’s practice. This focus within practice involves a shift of
attention from the deliberate (directly purposeful) to the process of
deliberation (care/weighing-up), by insisting that purpose or meaning is not always
synonymous with the notion of achieving a ‘goal’.

Current
preoccupations within Cocker’s ongoing enquiry include:

(1) Practising the self (otherwise):
exploring different artistic practices that seemingly operate as contemporary
manifestations of the Ancient Greek ‘practices of the self’ or ‘arts of
existence’ (techne tou biou) where life (in Foucault's terms) is conceived as a material that is malleable and to be approached as "aesthetic production as if it were a 'work of art'". In parallel, investigating different tactics
through which the experience of self is pressured towards its limits, where the
illusory boundary between self/other or self/world becomes porous including
through collaboration practices of being-with; (2) Practising of attention: through the cultivation of preparatory or preliminary practices, how do we actively create receptive conditions for radical forms of attention, awareness and empathetic relationality, which in turn might give rise to new forms of creative action, the potential for a more ethical — perhaps even resistant — mode of human agency and subjectivity, where practising is not undertaken for ‘reaching towards’ a specific telos but as a mode of autotelic sense-making in its own right?; (3) Tactics of affirmative resistance /resistant affirmation: how
might we resist or dislodge the ubiquitous demands to do more and more – faster
and faster – that arguably underpin our contemporary culture of immediacy and
urgency, of 24/7 access and availability, with its privileging of multitasking,
perpetual readiness and ethos of ‘just-in-time’ production. How might not
knowing, uncertainty, indeterminacy, the untranslatable or unexplainable
alongside the non-teleological (non-action, doing nothing, non-doing) operate
in critically resistant terms?; (4) Experimental micro-temporalities and
co-incidings: how do different creative processes affect and shape our lived
experience of time, disrupting the linear perception of chronos, to reveal and
bring into relation a plurality of micro-temporal co-incidings? How might we
organise or even score our time together (differently)?; (5)
Conversation-as-material: conversation conceived not only as a means for
reflecting on practice, but also as a generative and productive practice
in-and-of-itself, both site and material for the construction of
inter-subjective and immanent modes of linguistic ‘sense-making’.
Conversation-as-material involves the quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary emerging
synchronous to the live circumstances that it seeks to articulate, where
meaning does not exist prior to the event of utterance but rather is
co-produced through the dialogic process of conversation itself.

Cocker
often works collaboratively with other artists: she is currently collaborating
with artist Clare Thornton on an ongoing project called The Italic I (2012
ongoing;) and is a key researcher on the project Choreo-graphic Figures:
Deviations of the Line (2014 ongoing) a collaboration with artist Nikolaus
Gansterer and choreographer Mariella Greil, for exploring and notating those
forms of thinking-feeling-knowing produced as the practices of writing, drawing
and movement collide. She previously collaborated with performance collective
Open City (2007 — 2010) and on a project entitled Re- with writer-curator,
Rachel Lois Clapham (2009 — 2012).

Cocker’s
writing has been published in academic collections, monographs, exhibition
catalogues, art journals and artist’s books, and she has presented papers and
lectures internationally. Her recent academic writing has been published in
Failure, (Documents of Contemporary Art Series, 2010); Contemporary Art /
Classical Myth (2011); Stillness in a Mobile World (2011); Hyperdrawing: Beyond
the Lines of Contemporary Art (2011); Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought
(2011); Liminal Landscapes, (2011); Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and
Representation (2012); Reading/Feeling (2013); On Not Knowing: How Artists
Think (2013) and Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2017). Her
first collection of writing, The Yes of the No, was published by Site Gallery,
2016. Cocker is a member of the Publishing Advisory Group for the Live Art
Development Agency, part of the Editorial Board for Architecture and Culture,
and a peer-reviewer for TRACEY, Rhizomes, Area and Architecture and Culture.
From 2001 – 2005 she was co-editor of the publication series Transmission:
Speaking and Listening – a joint venture between Site Gallery and Sheffield
Hallam University. Cocker's writing on contemporary art has been published in
magazines/journals including Frieze, Camera Austria, Dance Theatre Journal, The
Art Book, drain, m/c, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, art + research
and Performance Research Journal.